Japanese authorities are probing whether an adult website company might have used loan-shark techniques to commit the extortion a company worker is accused of committing against those accessing the sites.
Published reports in the Japanese media indicated April 18 that the worker rented seven apartments under the company president's name, Toshiaki Nakanishi, and used them to run websites and manager-user information including telephone numbers—while a reputed loan-sharking operation used two of the rooms in the units.
The website company name was not disclosed in published reports about the case.
Nakanishi is suspected of being involved in the loan-sharking operation and applying such techniques – including cell-phone accounts under false identities for demanding payments and bank accounts under different names to handle the monies – to extort site members and to keep themselves from being detected, according to those reports. The money-lending company was searched in July 2003 because it was suspected that they were charging interest as high as 20 times above the legal interest limit, the reports added.
Five people including the worker noted earlier have been arrested on fraud charges in the case, while Osaka police reportedly have a warrant to arrest Nakanishi, who is accused with other suspects of creating sites falsely advertising porn pictures.
"Unlike other similar sites that confirm the users' intent to register," said the Daily Yomiuri, "clicking anywhere on the firm's sites causes the message 'membership registration is completed' to appear, from which time the user is required to pay fees."
